


Curiouser and Curiouser

by Misaya (orphan_account)



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1951), Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Adopted Children, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Adoption, Alice in Wonderland References, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Alice in Wonderland, Coma, Dark, Dark Fantasy, Dark Thor, F/M, Fantasy, Gen, Horror, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Loki Angst, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki-centric, M/M, Magic, Psychological Horror, Smoking, Trouble In Paradise, Wonderland, tbh this story is all implication
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1913283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's trouble in Wonderland. The King and Queen are at odds, the Prince of Hearts has gone missing, and their adopted son shows no sign of waking up any time soon. Loki wakes up, only to discover that he has not really woken up, and goes on to realise that maybe things are exactly how they appear, no matter how much one might not want them to be. </p><p>Wonderland-AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mischief and Misdirection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sigynthefaithful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sigynthefaithful/gifts).



> Started out as a prompt from The Bookverse Challenge Dropbox. Modified for a larger fandom, and also because I think it's a really cool idea anyway.

“Oh, come now, my dear, I’m sure our darling Loki will wake up soon,” the Queen assured her husband, patting what she can reach of his sleeve in what she hopes is a consoling manner. The King looks furious, his cheeks a bright scarlet, and the Queen has the strangest urge to laugh – Who painted your cheeks red? Off with their heads! – but she knows that it is hardly an appropriate time to laugh. “He can’t be too poorly,” she tells him, but she hopes secretly that Loki is, if only so he will have the chance to escape the King's reign of terror for a few hours, a few days, a few months. She hopes he never wakes up. She wonders if that makes her a bad person.

She’s stood over his sleeping form, pale and drawn, bow lips pursed in a faint, secret smile. She’s held a pillow in his hand, looking from its soft, downy surface to him, back and forth, back and forth, long after the rest of the castle is already asleep, and has thought, _What if, what if, what if -?_ In the end, though, she’s never had the strength to go through with it, and she’s always placed the pillow back underneath Loki's head, pressed a soft kiss to his cheek, and tiptoed back to bed. She wonders if this makes her a bad mother, before she reminds herself that she is not really his mother, that his mother is an unknown woman in a foreign world. She wonders if his mother thinks about him, if she misses him, how much she would give to see Loki's firsts. First steps, first words, first teeth.

The King had been delighted, had held out fat fingers for the baby Loki to grasp, had plied him with cookies and jellies and soft toys. Finding Loki crying in the rose gardens had been a blessing, and the day the Ace had brought him back to the castle, swaddled in a paint-stained cloth, the King hadn’t even had any of them beheaded, even though they had clearly been painting the roses red.

Loki's bluebirds twitter and cheep around the King's head, and he waves them away irritably. They were nice and friendly howdy-do birds, and Loki had managed to coerce a dozen of them into his little plot in the castle’s gardens. They were fond of singing and chirping at all hours of the morning and the night, but the King had allowed him to keep them, a bribe to ensure his happiness. “Everyone should have a dozen bluebirds,” Loki had said, and the King had ordered the cooks to crumble up uneaten crusts or pastries for the birds to eat.

“If he had only listened to me,” the King snarls, and the Queen is afraid he will start yelling again. “If only he wasn’t so obsessed with that damned cat, trouble is all he is,” he hisses viciously. “I want that cat’s hide. I want that filthy pink and purple vermin held responsible for his crimes.”

While the Queen wants to agree, she knows that it is a moot point. The Cheshire Cat is a master of mischief as well as misdirection, and the Queen doesn’t think any amount of searching or begging or bribing will come to anything. And he hadn’t forced Loki to climb that tree, not really, he couldn’t have, the cat had no substance, all purple stripes and fur and a curved sliver of a bright mouth. The Queen wonders often if the crescent moon outside Loki's window is really the moon, but never mentions this to the King.

“Dearest,” she tells him, patting his hand soothingly, “dearest.”

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and she sighs and pats his back awkwardly as he bursts into tears, fat, ugly teardrops slipping down his face and splashing against the tiled floor with little plip-plops.

“I want him dead,” he sobs into his hands. “I want them all dead for what they’ve done to my sons!”

 _And, therein,_  the Queen thinks,  _lies the very problem,_ but she says nothing and hushes him gently, wiping away his tears.

* * *

Loki wakes up with a start, gasping and sitting up, his heart racing as though he’s just run through the entire castle maze and all its dead ends without pausing for breath. He reaches down to push off the blankets, eyes widening as his hand goes right through the heart-patterned quilt, a scream rising in his throat as he looks just a bit to the right and finds another hand, pale and thin, clutching at the covers. He squashes it in time – it is night, it appears, and it wouldn’t do to have the castle waking up. He doesn’t want to imagine whose heads would roll for his carelessness in waking up the King.

Moving in slow increments, he turns to look behind him, gasping as he sees the person behind him. Stringy dark hair frames a pale, drawn face, cheeks hollow, mouth pursed in slight disapproval and sarcastic amusement. The colour has long since fled the cheeks – _his cheeks_ – before him, and he is the colour of chalk, the colour of the ugly, dying white roses in the farthest reaches of the castle gardens, the ones that hadn’t been painted yet.

He reaches out, hesitant, biting his lip – and have his lips always been so pale? he wonders, tracing over a chapped, bloodless mouth – and isn’t quite so surprised this time when his hand goes all the way through his head. And how odd of a sentence that is, he thinks to himself, giggling, even for Wonderland standards. But he doesn’t wake up, not even a twitch of his eyelids, and Loki thinks that perhaps it is better that way.

He lies down, tries to align his bodies, but even though he tries again and again, even though he is convinced every hair is in place, he still feels no difference, and sits up again to find himself still in two distinct beings.

He looks at himself, looks very hard, raises a hand and brings it down against his cheek, but there is no sound and his hand passes directly through his face, coming out intact on the other side. He thinks that this is perhaps the strangest dream that he has ever had.

He looks around his room, at the beam of moonlight shining through the open curtains, and goes over to it. His feet make no imprints on the soft carpet of his room, and when he looks behind him, he finds the moonlight passing directly through him, finds that he casts no shadow. The mirror over his vanity remains blank even as he sits on the stool in front of it. The small, heart-shaped cologne bottles on his dresser remain stubbornly stationary, no matter how hard he tries to pick one up, but he thinks as he draws his hand back out through one of them that he can detect the soft smell of sandalwood and oranges.

He wants to laugh, and so he does, tossing his head back and laughing loudly, gaily, before stopping suddenly and looking around, listening hard. There are no footsteps on the stairs, no voices, and the castle sighs in its sleep, creaks and groans of a house settling in for the night.

Loki glides over to his bedroom door, taking one last look at himself – he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to rationalize this – before stepping directly through the white wood and out into the hall.

He runs down the cobblestone corridor, his footfalls silent, and he reaches the end of the corridor, laughing at the freedom, at the fact that he isn’t out of breath at all. He runs through the castle, popping through the entranceways of rooms that have always been locked, that he has always been forbidden to go to. He runs into the library, which his mother has always said has been off limits, looks very hard at a book lying open on the table. It is something about military strategy, and after attempting to pull another book down from the shelves and failing, Loki leaves.

In the kitchens, he bends down and buries his face in a cherry pie that some baker has forgotten to pack away for the night. Other than the phantom sensation of delicate crumbs and the lingering, faint taste of tart, sweet cherries, Loki pulls his face back out and finds that the pie is completely unscathed. He hopes that the baker, or somebody, will put the pie away before his father wakes up and begins his morning inspection of the castle. With the way his father has been recently, Loki wouldn’t be surprised if something as little as this would be enough for a declaration of corporal punishment.

He goes to the cards’ quarters, looking at the card soldiers neatly stacked, two or three to every cot, here where ranks don’t matter, and Aces and fives can sleep together as easily as eights and nines, where nobody will judge them and nobody will tell them to line up in order. He smiles, and hopes that one day this bedchamber equality can somehow make its way into the public eye.

He saves his parents’ bedroom for last, gliding silently through the door, perching on the very edge of their bed. The King is snoring loudly, and the Queen is mumbling lightly in her sleep. He wonders what his father is dreaming about, if his dreams feature guillotines and poleaxes, if these are the equivalent of nursery stories for him.

He stares at his father for so long and so hard that he doesn’t notice that the Queen's eyes are open and she is staring directly at him. He gasps, sits up straighter, readies to make a run for it, but the Queen isn’t looking at him, not really, just staring through him.

“Loki?” she asks, her voice soft and curious, and Loki wants to reach out and hug her, wants to tell her not to worry about him. “My sweet Loki,” she murmurs quietly, before turning over to curl into the curve of the King's side and falling asleep again.

Loki feels tears spring unbidden to his eyes, and he presses the back of his hand against her mouth to muffle his sobs, but there is no sound that anyone can hear besides himself, and his tears evaporate the instant they hit his parents’ bedspread, as if they were never there at all.

Unable to stand another minute, another second in the room, Loki leaves, taking deep, slow breaths to calm himself down, feeling helpless and lost and intensely angry for a reason he cannot himself explain. Breathing hard, he pounds back to his room, flinging himself onto the bed and grabbing himself by the shoulders. He ignores the way his hands disappear into himself, ignores the complete lack of motion as he shakes and shakes and shakes himself.

“Wake up!” he screams, sobbing. “Wake up wake up wake up!”

But he doesn’t. He wonders if he even can.

He presses his head down onto his bed, sobbing wildly, angrily, punching at the mattress with his fists, leaving no dents.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” a disjointed voice says somewhere above his head, and he chokes back a sob, turning around wildly on the bed to try to find the source of the voice.

His gaze falls out the window, where a bright sliver of crescent moon dangles outside his window, illuminating the labyrinth and rose gardens below, casting bright white light on the woods beyond. The woods where he has only been once, and then, and then what? he wonders to himself.

“Go on,” the disjointed voice prompts him. “There’s nothing to stop you. Don’t you want to know what’s out there?”

“Yes,” he breathes, before clapping his hands over his mouth at this traitorous admission. He has never been allowed to leave the castle before, the Queen always reminding him of the dangers that lurked outside the palace walls before telling him to go play in the gardens if he was really that bored. “Yes, I do,” he admits, holding himself up straighter, as if this will give him more confidence.

“So go,” the voice whispers by his ear, and he whips around, but there is nothing there. “Go. No one will know.”

He swallows roughly, turns to look at himself – he certainly isn’t going anywhere, he thinks – before taking small, hesitant steps that grow in length and determination the closer he gets to the castle entrance.

He pauses in front of the solid oak doors, silent, wondering what it will be like.    

“Wondering isn’t going to get you anywhere,” the voice says, singsong, and Loki wonders for the first time why this voice, this invisible person, can see him and why he cannot see them. “And sometimes people don’t want to be seen. You must understand that, surely.”

He does –  _don’t scream don’t breathe or he’ll know you’re here, holding his eight-year-old fist over his mouth as black boots march in front of him angrily_  – and he nods once, twice, to assure himself, before taking a deep breath and stepping out into the night.


	2. Labyrinth Terrors

The grass faintly prickles against Loki's bare feet, just the faintest brush of green, silvered in the moonlight, and Loki wonders for just the briefest of moments if he should go back up and get shoes. He glances back over his shoulder, looking up at his bedroom window, wondering if he concentrates hard enough, he will be able to fly, fly up, up, up, past the beams of the entry doors, hands grabbing at the ivy that trails along the cobblestone walls, fly directly through the glass that mirrors the perfect crescent sliver of the moon –

He swears he can see the white slice move, blink, once, twice, and he rubs his eyes hard, blinking again up at his window where the moon stays now, still and silent.

He thinks about going back up. Thinks about how silly this is, how improbable, how unlikely. But his gaze keeps getting drawn back towards the woods, tall treetops all dark leaves and black branches, swaying tantalizingly over the hedges of the castle labyrinth.

_“Why does the big maze go all around the castle?” he remembers asking his father when he was still a small child, clutching at his father's bejeweled fingers, when the bloodlust had not yet awoken in his father's breast. “Doesn’t it make it hard for people to come and visit us?”_

_The king had hefted Loki onto his lap, had combed through his fine, dark hair with ruby and diamond hands, deftly putting loose strands in their proper places. “Of course, my child,” he said, and Loki wanted to tell him that he was pulling too tightly at his hair, that it hurt, but the king was in one of those black moods again, and he felt it best not to say anything. “Why, that’s the whole point of them. That way, you’ll know if the person really wants to see you. If they don’t really want to, well, I guess they won’t try very hard to get through, right?”_

This had made sense, at the time, but as Loki grew older, he wanted to question why it was the king didn’t want anyone to visit him. His inquiries had always met with harsh replies:

“It isn’t your place to question my judgment,” was a personal favourite of the king's, and, eventually, Loki had stopped asking.

During his lessons, he daydreamt, staring out the window over the White Rabbit’s ears and wondering who, or what, lived in the forest beyond the castle. He had scolded him several times about it.

“Loki, you really must pay attention to your lessons!” he chirped, his voice sounding too bright and too eager for a school day. “How else are you going to ascend the throne?”

 _What makes you think I want to?_ he’d wanted to say, and it had been on the very tip of his tongue before he pictured his own head rolling at the bottom of the royal cairn. And as much as Loki didn’t want any part of the Wonderland nobility, he certainly didn’t want to die.

The woods in front of him looked more menacing than they ever had before, darker, thicker, frightening, and Loki was seriously considering waiting for the fresh light of morning to bud over the horizon and illuminate the treetops with golds and pinks, to make it seem just a little bit friendlier. But he wasn’t entirely sure what would happen to him at dawn; would he dissipate, evaporate into mist? What a waste that would be, one night wasn’t long enough for freedom.

Loki takes a deep breath, tinged with the sharp tang of frost – it will be winter soon, and the Mome Raths will already have begun their swift migration south, if the White Rabbit’s biology books were to be trusted – and takes a step forward. Another, another, another, until he is standing at the entrance to the labyrinth.

Looking at the thick hedges before him, he remembers floating through closed doors and locked gates in the castle, and confidently steps forward, directly into a thick hedge. He gets about halfway through it before he feels something slippery and slick wrapping itself tightly around his wrist, and he looks across to see what it is, but he cannot see, it is too dark, there are too many leaves and brambles –

It digs into his skin, and he screams, tugging his hand away, trying to get it off him, and a sharp, ripping pain shoots up through his right arm, sending red and white dots dancing before his eyes from its intensity, before he tugs himself free and stumbles out on the other side of the hedge. He bends over, resting his hands on his knees, gasping for breath, before daring to venture a glance at his arm.

Much to his horror, his arm is bloody, wide gouges and scratches marring the skin, some as deep as his bone, and if he braces himself and peeks in between flaps of skin, he can see slivers of white amongst all that red. He swallows roughly, trying to calm himself down – the pain is ebbing quickly, now no more than a dull ache, but the wounds remain as deep and ugly as before, and he wonders if it will show in his bedroom.

Loki looks over his shoulder at the offending hedge. A dark vine flickers through some openings in the leaves, black and lashing and vengeful, and, cast against the moonlight, Loki can see the dark thorns embedded in its surface every few meters.

“That’s cheating, you know,” says the voice, above him this time, and he looks up to find the moon smiling at him. “What’s the point of a maze if you’re not even going to try? Hmm? Might as well just burn the whole thing down.”

Loki has a sudden vision of flames licking through the hedges, setting the rosebushes ablaze, bright reds and yellows painting the castle with smoke, eating at his parents’ tapestries, creeping up their covers, pushing dark soot into the king's nostrils and pressing down hard –

“But what a shame you cannot lift a match,” the voice continues, playfully, and Loki frowns. “If only there were someone to help you…”

“I suppose there’s a good reason why you can’t?” he says sarcastically. Politeness has never been his strong suit. “What, beheading scare you? They’d have to reach you first.”

The moon waxes wider before his very eyes, a larger smile, and Loki feels a chill run down his back at the familiarity of this situation, but he cannot put a finger on when this might have happened to him. He has never been outside of the castle gardens before.

“Why, my dear,” the voice says, lilting and silky and terrifying, “what would be the fun in beheading something twice? No fun at all. But your words wound me. I’ve never been helpful? What blasphemy. It’s not that, it’s just that you aren’t applying yourself.”

The voice shifts into a parody of the White Rabbit, and Loki wants to laugh, at how absurd and crazy this all is.

“You know how to get out,” the voice continues. “You just have to think.”

And then the moon is solitary and silent once again, and even though Loki asks it numerous times for help, it doesn’t reply, doesn’t move, and he smacks at the nearest hedge in frustration before remembering the giant vine slithering through the bushes and keeping well away from them afterwards. He puts one foot in front of the other, shivery grass skimming against his heels, and tries not to look at his mangled arm as he begins to navigate the maze.

* * *

 The first turn he comes to, he picks right. The second turn, a left; the third, another left. He doesn’t have any rhyme or reason about it, but trial and error never really harmed anyone, did it?

Unless you were the King's victim, of course. In which case, trial and error was a very bad thing indeed. Loki remembered the last trial he had been present at: a four of clubs, found guilty of desecrating the king's roses and painting their white petals with scarlet. This was already a big enough crime in itself, but red paint had been outlawed in Wonderland, at least as far as the king was concerned, and the already-present supply of red paint had been mixed with white to make a nice, neutral pink shade.

_“No!” the four had shouted, even as the spades dragged him off to the execution block. “I didn’t buy it! I swear on my life!”_

But by that point, his life had been a moot point, and the King had laughed nastily before turning to Loki and asking him if he was having a good time. Loki had agreed, out of self-preservation, and the King had been none the wiser.

Out of whimsy, Loki turns back after three more turns, but comes face to face with a clearing in the maze he hadn’t remembered passing. The space is filled with rose bushes, red, of course, and the cloying smell of dying flowers is strong enough to make even Loki's head spin.

He can see a door at the far end of the clearing, decides that this is a far faster and more convenient way, and begins to walk through. The rosebushes and oppressive hush surround him on all sides, and holds his breath, every crackle, every tiny twig breaking capturing his full attention.

The hair on the back of his neck prickles for no good reason; he puts a hand back there to assure himself, to steady his nerves, to calm down, wondering why he is all of a sudden so afraid.

_It’s just the gardens, it’s just like the ones outside of the maze, don’t worry, breathe, breathe, oh god, what is that smell?_

Even the too-sweet scent of the roses is not powerful enough to mask another, primal smell: metal fresh from the forge, strong and sharp and piercing. This, coupled with a low, almost indiscernible sound, has Loki freezing, looking back over his shoulder and wondering whether he ought to make a run for an opening that he can no longer see.

He makes his way forward, hesitantly, step by slow step, and the moon disappears behind a bank of clouds. As it comes back out again, he presses his hand to his mouth to stifle a scream.

A large, striped cat, its head down, chewing away at what remains of a card – a seven of diamonds, it looks like – a brush still held in his limp hand, its bristles stained a bright scarlet. The cat’s jaws move up and down, a harsh, chewing sound, and its striped purple tail flicks lazily from side to side as it eats, bright eyes focused intently on its task.

_You should never go outside the grounds, Loki dear, the Queen had said. There are horrible things out there, with a gesture to the maze and the woods beyond with a flick of her fan. I just want you to be safe, because I love you, you understand that don’t you?_

_Yes, yes, yes, I understand,_ Loki wants to say now, but it is far too late for that sort of thing. He remains rooted in place, breathing very slowly, very quietly, so as not to alert it to his presence, tries not to look at it.

The cat turns, its profile half-shadowed, half-lit, and fixes Loki with a bright yellow eye. It grins at him, displaying a mouth full of sharp, big fangs, stained rusty, and Loki claps his hands over his mouth to try to stifle a scream, but the sound leaks out through his fingers anyway and he can taste copper and scarlet against his tongue –

“Scared?” the cat asks him, and through the haze of fear he realizes that it is the moon’s voice. “You oughtn’t have second guessed yourself. Uncertainty is the downfall of many a great man. Just ask your brother, but you haven't talked to him in so long, now have you...”

The cat stalks toward him, its face dripping, and Loki wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to run into the hedge because even that thorn-studded vine is preferable to this, but then the cat is already in front of him, tilting its head to examine him.

“There’s a door right there,” it says, jerking its head over its shoulder to indicate it. “Why don’t you go?”

It takes a few moments, but he finally finds enough breath to whimper, “Y-you’re in my way.”

“I’m in your way, now, am I?” the cat says, amused, flicking its tail from side to side. It steps smartly to his left. “There. No further complaints, I trust?”

 _But the seven_ , he wants to say, _but the seven is still there, I can’t very well walk over him –_

The cat nudges his back with its nose, and he jumps, leaps half a foot into the air in sheer fright. It laughs at him, and nudges him forward again, pushing him closer closer _closer_ still until he has no choice but to look down to find where to place his next step so as not to step on the corpse.

Its half-eaten face looks up at him, the eye open but unseeing, already clouded over, its mouth twisted in a display of horror, and Loki chokes back a cry - _because that blond hair, a smattering of stubble on the jaw, the milky blue eye, that can't be Thor can it oh god no oh god no -_  and leaps over it. He throws a terrified glance over his shoulder to find the ground clear, no body no cat no roses, to find that he has been in a hedge corridor the whole time, and isn’t sure whether to take this as relieving or profoundly terrifying.

He turns forward again, steels herself, and reaches out to open the door.


	3. Mirror

With every breath, Loki swears he can feel every little sinew, every fibre of muscle in his mangled arm twitch, sending rackets of pain shooting into his brain. He tries not to look, but finds himself utterly fascinated by the morbid details, flayed flesh, blanched bone peeking through, _maybe if you reach far enough in you'll be able to touch your heart_ , and he has to stop his other hand from straying to fiddle at the cuts and gashes the brambled vine left behind. 

The path is velvet beneath his bare feet, a deep red like the insides of the plum candies he used to chew as a kid, tucked high into one cheek and staining his teeth bloody. 

_"Do you want some candy, little brother?"_

_Thor, holding out his hand, big broad palms cupped around pink red purple circles of chalky candy that left white dust on his hands long after he'd finished handling them._

_"I do want candy I do!"_

_But it was wrong, the picture was all wrong, his hand reaching out, already slender, long-fingered, no chubby childhood digits, no sticky palms, and when he looked up Thor was smiling in that curious way of his, like he knew something Loki didn't, and wasn't that infuriating? Leaning forward, beard scratchy against his jaw, mouths brushing against each other, a tongue slipping into his mouth, curious texture, curious taste, curious curious curious, reaching into his mouth to steal away the half-dissolved candy, a bleached button of white._

_"You have to promise not to tell Mum and Dad."_

_"Why not?" His voice, coming from a great distance, still struggling to shape itself around the white powder and plum candy. It was harder and harder to move his tongue, and he wondered why, but it felt funny and he was funny and he was laughing as Thor pushed him down into the mattress and was this what it was like to fall through a cloud it was so soft -_

_"Because I said so." A whisper from a faraway place, and then beard scraping against his belly his thighs his -_

A sweeping against his bare feet, the oddest sensation of something passing directly through his legs. Loki looks down -  _don't look at your arm don't look at it don't look! -_ as he watches a dog with broom bristles on its tail and its mouth sweeping away the path beneath his feet. He watches as the dog pauses, half in half out of his legs, looks around, sniffs, before giving a little shrug and returning to sweeping away the path, continuing on behind him. He cranes his neck over his shoulder to watch the dog's progress, leaving little pale pink clouds in its wake. 

The woods stretch dark and strange in front of him, and for the first time he wonders what it would be like if it were only him, if this is what it would feel like. 

He decides that he doesn't like it as he takes a deep breath and takes one tentative step forward into the darkness. 

* * *

"This way." 

"That way."

"The other way."

Loki stares up at the signs that festoon the branches of the trees above him, and wonders who has the time to write all these confusing directions, if the direction-writers themselves even know where the different emptinesses of the forest lead. 

His earlier question is answered by a pair of pencils, beady-eyed, hopping along the branch, tacking up a new sign, scribbling a new directive even as Loki watches. He laughs, and they pause, the graphite dragging along the vertical of the "Y," before shrugging it off and finishing the notice. 

"They're writing the signs to the castle," a voice behind him says, and Loki whirls around to find the cat from earlier standing behind him, and he just barely manages to swallow his shout of surprise. The cat's jaws are clean, though its tongue is still flicking around lazily, cleaning. Loki swallows roughly, hopes to God that whatever this thing eats, it won't eat him. 

"What? Cat got your tongue?" it asks him, and Loki can swear it smiles, baring sharp canines. 

When Loki doesn't reply, the cat just shrugs and lifts a paw off the ground, pointing down an unmarked path. "You'll want to go that way." Even as he watches, peering through the dark avenue of trees, another pair of pencils comes up and writes a sign on an adjacent branch. 

When he chances a glance over his shoulder again, he finds that the cat has gone. 

He looks down the path the cat indicated, and tentatively steps towards it. 

He wonders if the cat knows that all roads in Wonderland lead to the castle at some point or another. 

* * *

The clearing he comes across is filled with all sorts of lovely creatures, things he's only studied in books and scientific journals, penned by the White Rabbit in long, sloping writing half cursive and half print. 

Umbrella vultures, their bodies closed folds of black. When they were sad, the White Rabbit had said, they would often turn themselves inside out, and their tears would collect in the now ladle-shape of their wings. 

An owl whose neck stretched out during flight to become an accordion. It was very impractical, according to the White Rabbit, and the species would have died out a long time ago had it not been for the fact that there appeared to be no natural predators. 

A cage-bird, who swallowed its children and carried them in its belly, transparent for all to see, until the chicks were ready to mature. 

Bulbous purple horns that would honk loudly if provoked, and who waddled around, plopping themselves into the nearest available puddles. 

Loki reaches out to touch the smooth silver surface of a bird whose head is a mirror. He giggles at its silvery coolness, and something lodges, disturbing, in the back of his mind as he smiles at his reflection, but he can't quite put a finger on it. 

After spending the better part of the morning there, watching the  _Momeus ratheus_ (colloquially, Mome Raths) run around, multitudes of colour, he gets up to leave, passing a stationary - sleeping? - pair of horns. They don't even honk at him as he passes, his ankles not even three centimetres from their heads. 

* * *

In the afternoon, he finds a lovely white-and-pink cottage, its gate open. 

"It must be the White Rabbit's house," he thinks to himself with delight; his tutor had described his house with pride several times in the past: the white wooden gate with the heart-shaped hole in the centre, the beautiful straw-thatched roof, the grandrabbit clock that his very own granddaddy had given him as a housewarming gift. 

Curious, he drifts up the cobblestone path, past a dodo and a lizard with a ladder who are arguing quite ferociously about the merits of smoking out giants, drifts straight through the pink wooden door into his tutor's house. 

The furnishings inside are not very fancy, but it feels like a home, all plush cushions and squashy couches and things you could really sink into if you were so inclined. Not like the castle's furniture, which was polished so highly that you were afraid to even sit down for fear of slipping off or for ruining your suede reflection. The living room table is covered with cogs, a pocket watch in the making; Loki can see the problem - jam inside the bowels of the watch - but no matter how many times he runs his hand over the purple substance, none of it comes off and he sticks his fingers in his mouth, tasting the faintest trace of grape and strawberry as he wanders up the stairs. 

The White Rabbit's bedroom is not grand by any means, and Loki, for the first time, wonders how much his parents are paying him for his services. Surely it can't be enough. 

The bed is small, tiny, and, granted, his tutor is a rabbit, but surely rabbits liked large beds as well, did they not? Loki thought he might have to ask when he got back. 

The grandrabbit clock in question is standing by the window, its hands a mockery of whiskers, and as it chimes the afternoon hour, its face opens up into a little marching rabbit with a top hat and a cane. Loki smiles in delight at its design, and decides that he ought to commission a clock like this for his bedroom. 

The White Rabbit's dresser is a clutter of textbooks, loose leaf notes written in the same half-cursive, half-print scrawl, and a little open jewelry case full of biscuits. "Eat me," "Take me," they proclaim, and Loki runs his fingers through lacy crusts and thin layers of buttery icing - 

_Shortbread crumbs on his chest, and he wants to protest, it is far too sticky and the cookies are melting all over his skin -_

_"Eat me, take me," Thor reads softly, and Loki wants to shout that that isn't what's written on the cookies, that they don't have words at all, that Thor must be losing his mind, he just MUST be going insane -_

The door downstairs slams open, and the White Rabbit comes bounding up the stairs into his bedroom, and Loki freezes, his hand caught quite literally in the cookie jar. The White Rabbit looks directly through him and slams down a book on his table, scattering dust and notes all over the place. While the White Rabbit putters around his bedroom, Loki squints his eyes and reads the notes written on the page that the book has fallen open to: 

_Fifth Moon, Day Thirteen, Year of His Grace's Reign 19:_

_The crown prince's colour has not improved. He is still sickly pale, rail thin, and refuses to pay attention to his lessons. There appear to be burn marks on his throat, although as far as I am aware he has no access to fire and he claims that he has no recollection of them happening, and was quite surprised when I fetched a mirror-bird to show him._

_The other crown prince, the one we do not speak of, has been confined to his quarters following a recent incident with a young kitchen servant. Said kitchen servant has been dismissed. Perhaps it may be of interest to study the other crown prince and his -_

Loki frowns in frustration. And his what? he wants to shout. If only he could turn the page.

The White Rabbit hops back over to his desk, reaching into his cookie jar and stuffing a biscuit into his mouth. The crumbs speckle his white fur, and Loki wants to laugh, his tutor looks so silly, but the White Rabbit just draws up a chair and sits down at his desk, sharpens a quill and dips it into a pot of ink before turning to another page farther in the book. 

_Ninth Moon, Day Seventeen, Year of His Grace's Reign 23:_

_The crown prince has not yet woken up. He still appears to be in a comatose state, and does not respond to any stimuli. Though his heart still beats, there is as of yet no way of knowing if his mind has survived its recent trauma, physical and mental._

Mental trauma? Loki wonders. He doesn't remember that.

 _Certainly, being informed of his brother's misfortune would be a great stressor,_ the White Rabbit writes, and Loki grinds his teeth in frustration. What misfortune? Why can't he remember? 

_The crown prince's skin appears to have a grayish cast, and he appears to be fading into the pillows. It is certainly a very curious ailment, and it is hoped that a cure will be found soon, or that, cards be willing, he wakes up._

_Wonderland is not a realm meant to be without a ruler. The consequences would be nothing short of devastating._

* * *

When it becomes apparent that the White Rabbit is not going to be writing any more about Thor, having already taken up three pages about the exact hue of Loki's skin and the way his cheeks seemed to be shrinking into his face, hollow and bare, Loki drifts out of his bedroom, floats down the stairs and out the door. 

He passes the dodo and the lizard, whose name appears to be Bill, still arguing about the merits of infernos as a method of containing household pests. Drifts through the gate, to the edge of the forest. At the periphery of the trees, he looks over his shoulder at the White Rabbit's house: his tutor can still be seen from his bedroom window, scribbling furiously and stuffing cookies into his mouth, his cheeks bulging out. 

_"Look at yourself," Thor commanded, grabbing a mirror-bird and rooting a hand through Loki's hair, forcing him to look into the bird's glassy head, to see his reflection, cheeks flushed, stretched and bulging, "filthy, gorgeous that you are."_

Loki shakes the memory out of his head - that definitely can't be right, he must be misremembering it - and steps into the forest once again, heading towards the sound of singing. 

 

 

 


	4. The Knave of Hearts

Just as Loki is beginning to think that he just may be lost, a kindly sign leads him in the direction of a house whose thatched rooftop is just barely visible over the dark treetops, a dwelling which apparently belongs to an M. Hare and an M. Hatter. Singing loops through the trees and into his ears, and he finds himself walking faster, a definitive bounce in his step as he pushes through the forest and out into the backyard of a very spacious mansion. If Loki didn't know any better, he might be tempted to say that the square footage of the place itself could give the castle a run for its money, but that would be treason and Loki is rather a fan of keeping his head attached firmly to the rest of his body. 

There is nobody better, richer, more powerful than the King. Everybody knows that. 

_"Someday this is gonna be ours, you see," Thor had told him, standing in Loki's bedroom by the window. "Both of ours. Just remember your promise, okay?"_

_Loki was sulking, sitting in front of his dressing table and rubbing the marks on his neck, frowning at them._

_"I don't remember what I promised you," he muttered, rubbing at the bruises, which were long petals of blue and black. "How am I supposed to keep promises to someone who will not protect me from the hideous beasts outside?"_

_"Beasts?" Thor had asked, looking over at him._

_"Of course. The ones who did this." Loki turned and indicated the bruises, and Thor had only smiled and told him that he ought to put some ice on that._

He frowns, shakes his head to clear his thoughts. He hasn't thought of Thor in a while, and briefly wonders why his brother is taking up so much of his mind recently. 

Turning his attention to the space in front of him, he at first rubs his eyes very hard, wondering why a cloud has decided to descend upon this particular backyard. When the cloud stays, he chances another step forward, his feet sinking into soft plush grass and the cloud clears just enough that he can make out the shape of several teapots standing on a pristine white table covered with all matter of teatime things: scones, finger sandwiches, pots of jam and clotted cream, and of course, the teapots, which upon further inspection appear to be whistling some sort of ditty. 

Fascinated, Loki takes another few steps forward, and the smells suddenly hit him all at once. Darjeeling, oolong, chai, English breakfast, and many other teas that he cannot seem to put a name to, fragrant and humid puffs of steam in the air. The table is set for a large number of people, and Loki privately thinks that he has never seen this many people show up for an occasion unless specifically mandated by the King. And the King was not too fond of tea, so he can't really imagine the reasoning behind all these place settings. However, most of them are empty, and Loki feels a little bad for these M. Hare and M. Hatter people, going to all the trouble of preparing a party where nobody showed up. 

He sits down in the closest chair, a squashy red armchair that Loki could easily see himself sinking into with a good book and a mug of peppermint tea, and examines the half-filled teacup in front of him, just off-center on a pretty china saucer with a pattern of pink and blue alternating flowers around the edge. He traces his finger lazily around the rim of the cup before pressing it into his mouth and tasting just the slightest hint of warm tea, bitter and steamy. The blue sugar pot is in front of the place a few seats to his right, and he leans over, his upper body sinking into the table as he dips his fingers into the sugar pot and brings them back to his mouth to taste. 

Rolling the taste of sweet and something underneath, something almost indescribably bitter that stick in the crevices of his mouth, Loki looks further down the table to find the silhouettes of two other beings shaded against the tea steam, supposedly the M. Hare and M. Hatter. He wanders over absentmindedly, trailing his hand through pots of tea and cups and saucers and tries to get the taste of the sugar out of his mouth, but it is sticking to his tongue so sweet so acidic so bitter - 

_pink red purple circles of chalky candy that left white dust on his hands_

"A very merry unbirthday to you!" the closest figure proclaims, and Loki jumps in surprise, pressing himself against the wooden chair he happens to be in front of. A scruffy rabbit with buck teeth and a red waistcoat is pouring tea for a short, stunted man with a large green hat, a tag reading 10 3/4 stuck in the brim. 

"And also to you!" the man proclaims, leaning over and grabbing at the nearest teapot, spilling dark brown all over Loki's hands and the white tablecloth, the tea spreading in the shape of a kidney, the colour of bruises and dying leaves as he pours it shakily into a blue teacup by the rabbit's paw. "What fun it is to be able to celebrate all of our unbirthdays together, wouldn't you agree?" 

"Indeed I would," the rabbit concurs, sitting back down in his chair and sipping at his tea, wrinkling his nose at the taste. "Far too strong. Needs a good dosing of milk and sugar. Maybe lemon. Certainly not all at the same time, but what are we saying? We're all mad here." 

Loki doesn't understood the humour behind it, but the man in the green hat (the Hatter, he supposes, it would fit quite well) is laughing, pounding at the table with every burst of laughter. In front of Loki, the lid of a purple pot lifts up, and Loki watches in wonder as a tired-looking mouse (the Dormouse! he thinks in great excitement, he's heard all about him and his immortality, his particular fondness for grape jam) peeps out, frowning at the two of them and their shenanigans. The Dormouse squeaks and tumbles out of the pot, rolling once twice thrice, directly into another cup of tea. The rabbit reaches in, plucking it out by the tail and frowning in disgust at it as it starts to squeal and struggle in his pinch. 

"Jam! Where's the jam?" he snarls, rifling through pots and plates as the Hatter laughs madly beside him. After a good few moments, during which most of the pottery has been thrown over the Hare's shoulder to smash on the grass, he unearths the pot of jam and slathers a knifeful on the mouse's nose, bright purple and smelling strongly of grape. 

"He's been like that quite a bit recently," the Hatter says conversationally, stirring his tea with the edge of his pinky finger before taking another few sips. "There hasn't even been a you-know-what around here in a long time." 

"A what now?" the Hare asks, sitting back and taking a big bite of his saucer. Loki watches in amazement as the rabbit's buck teeth work up and down, shards of china tangling themselves in his fur. 

"You know. A C-A-T. A cat." 

The Dormouse, who had been placidly watching the two of them and sniffing at the jam on his snout, suddenly breaks free of the Hare's grasp and begins to make a break for the end of the table, overturning pots of tea and sugar in his wake. The Hare scowls in great displeasure, knocks the Hatter over the head with an elbow, and stands up to rummage around in the great drum of the Hatter's ten-gallon. He pulls out a wooden mallet before hopping onto the table and pursuing the mouse with great bounds and leaps that spill even more teapots and plates to the ground, occasionally bringing the hammer down with great smashes. Loki winces with each thump and the resulting shatter of breaking glass. 

One thump yields a squeal, a squeak, and a sudden silence. The Hare silently comes back to their end, the relatively undemolished end of the table, holding the Dormouse by its tail, its broken body swinging listlessly from side to side. 

The Hatter tuts. "What a shame, he was a cute little bugger, too," he says, shrugging as the Hare lays the mouse down on the table, directly on the plate in front of Loki. From this angle Loki can see everything, the little soft pelt of grey fur, the black markings on its face, the clawed pink feet, and the taste of sugar is bitter in his mouth...

"He's been antsy ever since he came through," the Hare mutters, sitting down heavily beside Loki and depositing the mallet on the ground unceremoniously. "You remember that?"

"Of course," the Hatter agrees, reaching over for a scone and shoving it into his mouth, crumbs spilling down his green waistcoat. "Not every day you get somebody coming in here claiming to be the Jack of Hearts." 

"He wasn't no Jack," the Hare scoffs. 

"You must be mistaken," the Hatter replies with a shrug. "That blonde hair, the beard, the insignia, that was the Jack all right." 

The Hare rolls his eyes, and Loki leans forward intently. They have to be talking about Thor. They just must be, but Thor would have no reason to come all the way out here. 

The Hare takes his time answering, upending a pot of sugar and licking off the white granules adhering to the fur on his paw. "You ask me," he says slowly, examining the white powder on the table in front of him, "he was a Knave through and through." 

Loki wonders why they are using the old title for the Jack, a title that has long since been struck from every dictionary and history book in the land. He absentmindedly traces the rim of the plate in front of him, trying to grasp the fleeting thought that is pressing in the forefront of his mind 

_a knave is a person who is_

and waits for the Dormouse

_untrustworthy_

to emerge again, smiling tiredly as though it is all a big joke, you cannot kill the Dormouse with hammers 

_dishonest_

because the Dormouse is immortal and is currently supposedly 366 years old and loves grape jam, but would take strawberry also 

_liar_

but the Dormouse remains perfectly still, its feet clawed and crabbed and the Mad Hatter and March Hare are sitting to the side, looking over at the Dormouse's still body slowly going rigid. 

* * *

It isn't until Loki has already left the Mad Hatter and March Hare's home and is well on his way through the forest again that he realises that for all intents and purposes, his formal court title is also the Jack -  _the Knave_ \- of Hearts. 

 


	5. SMOKE

Letters of all different colours spill through the air above Loki's head as he pushes past tall blades of grass whose tops he cannot see. Thor might be able to see them, if he were here, but he's not here, and Loki feels like this is a place where he can't possibly fit in, he's too small to garner attention. A melancholy voice is singing somewhere in the distance, some haunting, lilting tune that has Loki's head spinning even as a giant blue C floats down and wreathes his face with a sickly sweet smoke that sets him to coughing and bending over, choking for breath. 

_What are you doing? he asks one afternoon after his lesson with the White Rabbit and sitting with Thor in Thor's room._

_Thor takes a deep breath from the hose-like apparatus, blows out a series of perfect concentric rings that billow straight into Loki's mouth. He gasps in surprise, tastes the thickness at the back of his throat, and he coughs._

_"It feels good," Thor rumbles, somewhere far away, and the walls are spinning, slowly, slowly, and Loki giggles as he catches a glimpse of himself in a nearby floor-length mirror, dizzy and tangled in the heart-patterned bedspread, the silky sweet smell wrapping itself around his throat, pressing down roughly, fingers of smoke reaching up his shirt and he doesn't like it, not really, it's hot and burning but the smoke doesn't understand what he's saying how could it it's just a breath of fire  
_

The smell in the air now is not unlike the one from his memories, but he shakes his head, wondering why he's having all these false recollections. The King would never have allowed such things inside the castle grounds; it wasn't right for members of the royal court to stray to temptation. In fact, it was downright illegal, although Loki had seen small glass bottles of amber liquor inside the King's stateroom, half-empty on more than a few occasions. He'd snuck a taste once, and the liquid had burnt his mouth and his throat and his stomach as it went down, and he'd shuddered, replaced the bottle, and hadn't been back for another sip. 

He pushes forward through the blades of grass, wincing as his damaged arm brushes against the dewy coolness of a stalk and sets his nerve endings stinging. The ground is spongy beneath his bare feet, cool moss soft and tender against his soles, softer than the carpet in his bedroom. He wonders how many days have passed, if he's ever going to get tired, if he'll ever go back to the castle again. He doubts it, but there's no place like home, not really. 

Though it hadn't been much of a home in the past few years, he thought to himself, frowning as he pushed through the grass. His father had gone mad two years or so ago, had started screaming for blood and had scorned the crescent moons, ranting and raving about a cat - Loki wondered if it had been the huge pink and purple one he'd seen a few times since the forest, flashes of colour out of the corner of his eye, bright against the drab surroundings, gone when he turned to look. He supposed it would make sense; his father had claimed the cat had done something to Thor, that the cat was the reason Thor was missing, and with claws like that, with teeth like those 

_killed him_

He pauses, trying to catch hold of the thought, but it leaves just as quickly as it came. The ground starts to slope upward now, and Loki leans his weight forward -  _do ghosts have waists?_ he wonders, then,  _Am I a ghost?_ \- to continue walking up the hill. As he reaches the top, the grass starts to thin out, and the letters become larger and larger, vowels and numbers and shapes of all colours and sizes floating through the air. He wonders if they have any particular significance. He reaches the summit, a bit dismayed to find himself out of breath. Surely ghosts, or whatever he was, didn't even have to breath, he certainly didn't have to back when he was first running through the castle, but perhaps it was just something related to being too far away from his body (and Loki sincerely hoped he wouldn't have to say that sentence again, ever). 

His gaze travelled down into the valley below him, searching out the source of the smoky letters floating listlessly above his head. It appears to be coming from somewhere in the middle of the valley, which is covered with huge yellow discs that Loki can't quite make out from this height. Tentatively, he toes his way down the steep hillside, grasping onto the branches of trees and edging along parts that aren't quite so vertical, slipping and skidding the last few yards to the bottom. 

Upon closer inspection, the large yellow rounds are the caps of giant mushrooms, and Loki cranes his head back, looking around him in awe, to where the gills of the mushrooms, thick and dark and black, block out the sky. The shady areas under their caps are cool and comforting, and Loki takes a few moments to walk through the pools of shadow slowly and try to catch his breath, but it's as though the smoke is clotting at his lungs, it's a bit harder to breathe but not entirely impossible, and Loki presses forwards towards the center of the mushroom forest. 

He clambers onto the top of a small brown mushroom, pulls himself up onto another red-and-white-spotted one, before taking a leap and landing in the center of the largest yellow mushroom of them all. The spongy surface is cool and firm beneath his hands, and he looks towards the far edge, where a slender nozzle is resting, smoke oozing from its mouth. As Loki watches, the smoke changes colours and continues to drift upwards lazily, curling into letters and scales and punctuation marks. He watches for a bit, fascinated, and tries to ignore the way the smoke tastes in his mouth. 

_Here, have a suck, Thor murmured, pushing the metal into Loki's mouth, pinching Loki's nose closed with his other hand, and Loki really had no choice_

He reaches towards this one now, wonders for a brief moment how he can pick this particular object up, but he drifts, distracted, pressing it into his mouth and taking a long breath. He holds it until his lungs start to ache and his vision is turning dark, before he takes a slow breath out, another, another, smoke filtering through his teeth and his nostrils in hues of green and red and blue. The smoke comes out in "O"s all over, and Loki wonders if he shapes his mouth differently he can make other letters or other things. 

He lies back, marvels at how comfortable the mushroom is - almost like his bed - and takes another breath, spills his name from his mouth with a sigh. He smiles in unabashed delight, and takes another hit, letting his eyes fall closed as he rests his head against a little bump on the mushroom's surface. 

He is there for so long that when he opens his eyes again, he finds that it is falling close to dusk, purple stretching across the horizon and the stars beginning to peek out in the night sky. The air is so thick with smoke that at first he can't make out any coherent symbols. A breeze comes along, billowing through Loki's plain nightclothes and setting him shivering, taking a few smoke signals with it and leaving the rest legible. 

Yes, there is his name, there is Thor's, the word "mirror" appears here and there, but what Loki finds most puzzling of all is the way the middle of the smoky words is just

"WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" 


	6. Dirge

It is Loki's first time seeing flowers that aren't roses. It is also his first time seeing flowers whose blooms loom above his head, whose slender green stems bow down with the weight of their heavy crowning petals, pistils, stamens, almost phallic in their nature, whose leaves are broader than Loki's waist. 

Loki's heard loads about the flowers in the far reaches of the nation, how they have voices and opinions and faces all their own, and tower above even the tallest being. He hadn't believed the White Rabbit; it just didn't seem possible, flowers that big surely couldn't exist, it just wasn't possible, but the White Rabbit had shown him pictures sketched in ink on tea-stained pages, had slipped a record onto the player and had let him listen to the beautiful chimes and phrases of the flowers singing, ushering in the spring and summer showers with lovely dulcet tones. Loki had almost cried; he'd never heard a song so pretty before. 

The smallest flowers in this particular garden are already at Loki's eye level, riots of colour, clots of hydrangeas in pinks and purples and blues. He lifts a hand up to stroke at silky petals, draws his fingers back quickly as the centres of the flowers crinkle and pairs of large, mournful eyes open turn to look at him. Their eyes scan over his face, and Loki holds his breath as mouths open beneath the petals, hot, sweet air fanning over his cheeks -  _will they sing? oh I hope they sing! -_ and recoils in horror as the flowers strain against the restraints of their stems, firmly rooted in the ground, mouths suddenly large and terrifying and full of sharp teeth gnashing and snapping centimeters away from his skin. 

"We don't want blood in our garden," they hiss, sibilant, haunting, and Loki unconsciously holds his arm closer to his body, wondering how they can smell it when he no longer can. The metallic scent has all but faded away, a distant memory. "Get out, get out, go! We don't want you here." 

He backs away, holding his hands up in supplication, straight into the stem of a clutch of bluebells. He looks up, mouth already starting to form an apology, when two long, slender leaves from a neighbouring flower reach over his head and grasp the chains of bluebells. Loki can see the sunlight filtering through the leaves, veiny and yellow-green, and it's funny how he can still see the outline of the moon in the sky, the moon always seems to be in the shape of a crescent, always as if a large man in the sky reached out and took a big bite out of it one day and never bothered to go and make a new moon. 

The leaves tug at the ropes of bluebells, sending them jingling merrily, and Loki hums along with the chimes as they play a scale, an octave up and down in either direction. The leaves begin to pull with purpose now, in earnest, and Loki wonders why the melody they're playing is so sad, almost a funeral dirge. He rationalises that it is probably something to do with the fact that winter is fast coming upon Wonderland and the flowers will begin to die, turning a brittle brown and toppling to the ground to rot. 

All around him, flowers begin to clear their throats and stretch their leaves, unfurling tight-closed buds to kiss the sunlight. 

A large rose that the queen would certainly have been proud of taps a slender thorn-tipped vine against a small rock, calling the other flowers to attention. 

"A few orders of business to be settled today, girls," she says, and Loki is wonderstruck by the soft buttery tones of the rose's voice, thinking that if the roses in the castle gardens had had voices, they wouldn't be half as nice. "We've got to practice that dirge today. And we need to deal with Maggie." 

"No!" a brittle, tight voice screams from behind him, and Loki whirls around, craning his neck back to stare up at the undersides of silky cream petals, tinged with pink. He flushes a little bit, thinking that the whole thing seems ridiculously private, like he's peeping in places he shouldn't, eavesdropping to things that are better suited for other ears. "You can't!" the flower shouts, almost ripping itself out by its roots, and as it is tugged back into place by a cluster of daffodils, Loki can see the distraught face of a pale magnolia, its lips pinched, its eyes sunken and haunted, despairing. 

The rose frowns at her, as if scolding her for interrupting. 

"You haven't been feeling well, Margaret," the rose says, her tones honeyed, cloying. "Look at you. You've got rot all over your leaves, and all manner of nasty aphids crawling around your roots. Consider it mercy." 

The magnolia opens her mouth to protest, but quick as a flash, the rose flicks a thorn-studded vine towards her, quickly slashing off the bloom, and Loki watches in horror as white sap spills out of the gaping wound where the magnolia had once been, shudders and jumps a step back as the magnolia tumbles towards him, silky petals resting to brush against the tops of his feet. From this angle, he can see her face in closer detail, the look of shock, the open mouth, a half-sentence right on the tip of her tongue, and he decides that the flowers are not at all as they appear in the books, that they are cruel, ruthless, rotten creatures. 

"And now that that...business is over," the rose says firmly, the vine slowly retracting, its thorns coated creamy, "we really must be getting a move on with that dirge, time is of the essence. Tulips, please begin with the arpeggios." 

The tulips start softly, a progression of minor chords that gradually grows louder and louder, until Loki's ears are ringing, and he claps his hands over his ears to try to drown out the horribly sad notes that have a knot blossoming in the middle of his chest, making it hard to breathe. 

He takes a shuddering gasp, another, another, and runs blindly out of the garden, smacking into the hydrangeas on the way. They ignore him completely, their eyes trained on the rose with a fervour and devotion that Loki has never seen before on any being, their mouths stretched around the words "and may the Prince's soul come to rest." 


	7. Chapter 7

The pair of twins that Loki comes across are quite possibly the ugliest beings he's had the chance to look upon, maybe with the exception of the King. But that would be treason, and Loki distinctly remembers a time when the King wasn't quite so hideous, when he still had both his eyes and the crinkles on his face weren't from anger but from laughing and from happiness. But that had been ages ago, Loki was sure, back when the walls didn't spin sometimes at night and the mirrors didn't have eyes and the roses were all a lovely, unpainted, uniform shade of red...

They sit on a log, shot through with rot, and Loki finds it a far cry from the trees of the forest prior, tall and majestic and almost sinister in their regal bearing. It's almost comedic, their round forms sitting obesely on the decaying wood, like a couple of colourful, too-plump grapes at the end of the season, and Loki is fascinated by the way their bodies bob with every motion of their hands, talking in soft murmurs to each other. He tiptoes closer, the grass swishing wetly over the tops of his feet, and tries to listen in on their conversation. 

Much to his surprise, they seem to be telling a story, one twin one sentence, the next the next. And odder than this, even, is that the story they're telling is an old nursery tale, told to unruly children who got on their minders' nerves but still were deserving of a bedtime story. Loki knows it like the back of his hand. He's been told it more than a few times, Thor's knees locking him safe, secure, in bed, sometimes pinchingly tight, but Loki was positively sure that he didn't mean it, he just didn't know how strong he could be sometimes, right? 

The grass is wet, slick, against the seat of his night clothes as he sits down in front of the twins, and rests his face in his hands, looking up at them and wondering who their potential audience is. One look around the clearing reveals nobody, nothing, and Loki thinks it quite silly to be reciting some nursery tale just for the benefit of hearing each other's voices. They're the same, the same intonations, one slightly higher in pitch than the other, creating a resonating effect that is slightly disconcerting, and Loki wonders what it would be like to have a twin, to be able to look at one another and see the same face, like a mirror, the sharp edges and contours of cheekbones perfectly defined and never fogging up with steam...

"The Walrus and the Carpenter, a poem," the twin on the left said, and Loki watched, enraptured, as the twin on the right bobbled his head towards the one on the right in acknowledgment. Their outfits seemed almost garishly colourful, all striped and bright reds and yellows, sort of like the colouring on a new deck of cards before they got all worn and torn under the King's jurisdiction. Loki loved the way their skin was powdery smooth, taking them out of the pack and laying them all out on the grass to stiffen up, and it was always a shame when the cards got torn and bent, missing a face here or there, dropping a spade every once in a while...

"The sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might," the twin on the right said after a few moments of thought, during which Loki mouthed the words to himself. He'd heard this story many times, and always found the ending rather funny and the oysters rather naive. Walruses weren't species to be trusted, though Loki had never seen one; likewise, he'd never laid eyes on the sea, although, according to the White Rabbit, the sea was a great expanse of blue water, dotted here and there with white-crested waves as far as the eye could see. Men went mad from looking at it for too long, apparently, and Loki wondered if it was kind of like the feeling he got whenever he started drowning in Thor's blue eyes. It was probably along the same lines. He thought that the sea was probably a dangerous place, and he should probably stay as far away from it as he could possibly be.

The King had once told him that he'd been on a voyage along a great body of water, a place near the Keys, and Loki wondered if the water there had been particularly harsh, if the waves had rocked the King's senses into madness. Surely that was a thing, wasn't it? There had been some chemistry lectures about bodily equilibrium being controlled through the ears, something about liquid levels going up and going down and whatnot. Loki couldn't quite remember it.

"He did his very best to make the billows smooth and bright, and this was odd, because it was the middle of the night," the twin on the left picked up, and Loki giggled a bit. It had always been a silly rhyme. Everyone knew that the sun went to sleep during the night, just like the rest of everyone else, unless they were unsavoury peoples, in which case they were altogether different...

_Lights had been burning under Thor's door, wavery and flickering, and Loki had tiptoed in, wincing as the door creaked open on its hinges, and Thor was sleeping, he was asleep, Loki was sure of it, but his eyes were open and staring vaguely up at the ceiling and his breath was coming in dark, shallow puffs as though his lungs couldn't believe what he was breathing in, and the room was so heavy with the scent of smoke that Loki wondered if perhaps there was a fire that he couldn't see just yet._

_He'd looked down on him, wondering how the view suddenly got so much better when one was high up, and Thor had looked blankly up at him, mouth slack around his words, his eyes bright blue like the sea, perhaps, widening as Loki held up his hand, all stained with red -_

"I don't believe he's listening, brother," the twin on the right says, nudging his twin in the stomach and causing him to jiggle nearly off his position on the rotting log. "Perhaps we have lost him to his thoughts."

"Perhaps," the twin on the left agrees, rolling his enormous girth over, nearly toppling over to stare at Loki. He squints, breathing heavily into Loki's face from his exertions, and Loki smelt stale wine and decaying moss and something that was a bit like sandalwood and a bit like Thor and a bit like old metal left out in the sun to rust, swords and scabbards rotting away in clutching hands of lords and ladies who went to war and never returned. "Getting lost in one's thoughts is quite dangerous, wouldn't you agree?"  He spends another moment scrutinising Loki, and Loki holds his breath, wondering if he stays very still he will somehow be able to fade out of vision. He eventually rolls away, turns back to face his brother to continue the story, and Loki listens hard, leaning over his knees and frowning. 

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of jacks and knaves and looking glass, of murderers and kings, and why his blood is boiling hot, and whether bodies sing." 

He's relatively sure this isn't in the original poem, which had something to do with cabbages and winged pigs and sealing wax, and was definitely not quite so serious. 

The twin on the right lets his voice linger on the last few words as he turns to look directly at Loki, and Loki feels a chill shudder up his vertebrae that has nothing to do with the balmy weather in the clearing. He swallows down the lump of apprehension that is knotting itself in his throat, and reassures himself that there is no way that the twins can possibly be referring to him, but even in his head it doesn't sound nearly as convincing as it ought to. 


End file.
